When Intel builds a new facility it builds big. The latest facility to open is located in Vietnam and cost $1 billion to develop. The high cost is not only due to the equipment it will contain, but the sheer size of the operation.

In total it covers 46,000 square meters, or around five and a half football fields. Inside will be roughly 4,000 employees with the main work carried out at the facility being that of processor testing and packaging, otherwise known as IC-packaging and testing.

Intel originally announced the building of the facility in Ho Chi Minh City in 2006 before construction commenced in 2007. At the time it was thought $300 million expenditure was required and 1,200 people would be employed. Both those figures seem to have increased substantially.

Intel stated that the combination of support from the government in Vietnam and the skilled workforce made it an easy decision to build the new facility in the country. Intel is also using it as a reference point for all future assembly plants due to its built-in efficiencies.

Although Intel will be pleased the facility is now operational, it’s Vietnam that is gaining the most from this opening. Around 4,000 new jobs are being created and off the back of that additional money will be pumped into the local economy. There will also be a growing support network around those thousands of workers allowing other businesses and services to appear and grow.

Building such a facility in the West makes little sense due to the high costs involved for Intel. It just doesn’t make sense to decide to do it and therefore countries in the U.S. and Europe lose out on the potential for thousands of jobs to be created.

With the facility now operational Intel should be able to take advantage of it’s efficiencies and scale almost immediately. Manufacturing, testing, and packaging processors just got a little bit cheaper and more reliable for the chip giant.